Continuing efforts have been made on several fronts to better manage power in computer systems in order to conserve electricity and extend battery life. Solutions for power conservation include improving designs of hardware components such as microprocessors, displays, and storage devices to make them more energy efficient. Solutions for power conservation also include the development of mechanisms in operating systems to allow computer users to adjust power to the display and hard disk as well as configure standby and hibernation modes of computer systems.
More recently, software developers have also taken the initiative to assess the effect of certain applications on power consumption on a computer system platform. In order for software developers to gather power data on applications, the computer system platform needed to be tested in a lab where measurement devices could be physically connected to the computer system platform to take accurate readings. This required additional resources that increased the cost and time of product development. The introduction of the smart battery has allowed some products to provide power consumption data for a computer system platform. These products, however, do not have the capability to determine the quality nor check the accuracy of the information supplied by the smart battery, nor do the products provide net power consumption information for an application being run on the computer system.
Thus, there exists a need for an efficient and effective method for determining the net power consumption of an application on a computer system platform.